MOSCOW -- 'We did the right thing shooting down the Korean airliner,' said the middle-aged Russian woman. 'That'll teach the Americans to send their spy planes over Soviet territory.'
'Yes,' said her companion in line at a Moscow bakery. 'They won't do it again in a hurry.'
These two may well have expressed the thoughts of most of the Soviet Union's 270 million citizens. Galya, 23, a Kiev nurse, raised her vodka glass to two British teachers on a chance meeting in a bar.
'When is your country going to see the light and become communist?' she asked.
Many Westerners are surprised to learn most Russians back their government and system wholeheartedly.
Western media pay so much attention to dissenters like Andrei Sakharov that their view comes to represent the secret thoughts of the majority.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Sakharov receives piles of hate mail from Soviet citizens every week.
Recently a Muscovite asked a woman from Gorky, the town where Sakharov lives in internal exile, what kind of life the Nobel Prize winning physicist lived there.
The woman looked blank for a moment, as if she had never heard of Sakharov. She quickly recovered: 'Oh, that crazy person. How should I know?'
Soviet indoctrination and propaganda are so well orchestrated it is almost impossible for the ordinary Russian to find out anything the authorities do not want him or her to know, or to interpret events except from a communist viewpoint.
The only source of information for the average citizen is the propaganda churned out by state-run newspapers, radio and television.
Indoctrination begins in the nursery. Tempting rewards are offered for political conformity and punishment for dissent.
Soviet schoolchildren returned from this summer's vacation, for example, to a little political refresher lesson. Teachers gave each class a large poster showing the evils of capitalism or the imagined aftermath of a U.S.-provoked nu:lear war.
One poster showed American coins labeled 'coins of murder' with sketches of human corpses under the coins. Teachers told their classes about the American threat to world peace 'and explained the foreign policy of the party and the Soviet state,' the Tass news agency said.
Children are virtually press-ganged into joining the Pioneers up to age 14 and then the Komsomols, or Young Communists.
The organizations are like the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts with one big difference -- mandatory political education classes every week. Later, when they start work, will come the obligatory political 'meetings.'
Nadya, 15, knows what happens when you refuse to be a Komsomol.
She has been criticized by her teacher countless times in front of the class and called in for private lecturing. Her school report has 'non-Komsomol member' stamped on it, meaning it will be impossible for her to go on to any higher education.
'The price is high for non-conformity in our system,' said Volodya, a former Kremlin driver. 'It's easier to go along with it and say you believe in it, even if you don't.
'Most people swallow what they're told, especially in the countryside and small towns and villages. In the bigger cities some of the more educated -- but not many -- question what they are told. But they don't question that deeply, and they only tell friends they trust.
'Publicly they just toe the party line,' he said. 'Life's easier then.'
Kolodya reeled off a list of privileges to those who had scaled the heights of Kremlin power by being aggressive and active members of the Communist Party: access to foreign goods and special shops, servants, luxury apartments and the best medical treatment.
He said it was only when he saw their privileged status that he became disillusioned.
'But most people don't see it, they don't see how the big shots live,' he said. 'They don't know they're laughing in our faces when they tell us the party makes us all equal.'
A common Western misconception is that Russians doubt their system because it cannot produce the quality foreign goods they covet.
A Jewish geophysicist who lost his job because he applied to emigrate -- a routine punishment for such anti-Soviet behavior - explained why this is not true.
'Maybe they do like Western goods and consumer items they don't have in the Soviet Union,' he said. 'But they are told and believe that in the West, only the privileged few have access to those things while there are millions unemployed and living in poverty.
'They believe the standard of living may be lower in the Soviet Union, but it is more equally spread and therefore the Soviet system is better.'
Even those who have the courage to question discrepancies between glowing press reports of socialist achievements and the realities around them revere Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, founder of the Soviet state.
The disillusioned Kremlin driver railed at his country's leaders because they 'violated Leninist principles.'
A teacher who cross-examined a British woman about what the West really thought of the Soviet Union covered her ears when the conversation turned to Lenin.
'You can say what you want about my country,' she said, 'but please, please don't criticize Lenin. To me he's holy.'
